Washington Native Plant Society: Review of Douglasia Occasional Paper 8

Review of Douglasia Occasional Paper 8

At last a detailed account and analysis of LF. Henderson’s World’s Fair collections!

A review of A Centenary Survey of Plant Life in Washington State: Retracing the 1892 Collecting trips of Louis F. Henderson by Sarah Gage and Sharon Rodman.

by Rhoda M. Love, Eugene, Oregon

I am delighted to see this interesting investigation now in print and happy to have been asked to review it. I have known since 1992, when I began writing the life of Louis F. Henderson, that Sarah Gage and Sharon Rodman were researching this early Northwest botanist’s important1892 collections. It is gratifying to see the project published by WNPS in a pleasingly illustrated format, and to discover what a comprehensive and scientific effort the authors have made of their comparison of Henderson’s survey of the Washington flora a century ago, with that of the same sites in 1992.

The result of their efforts is a handsome 115-page work that I have read with interest and on whose pages I have made copious notes. However, space is limited and I can provide only a general outline here. Louis F. Henderson was 39 years old, recently recovered from typhoid, and living in Olympia when tapped by the Washington State World’s Fair Commission to collect plants and timber for the state display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Henderson, who later stated that the pleasures of plant collecting “fill a botanist’s heart to overflowing,” jumped at the chance to carry out the commission, even though his salary would be a meager $175 per month, and he would be responsible for providing all the collecting materials needed for the task. Gage and Rodman, using a database of their own design, and starting with Henderson’s reports and the 1,505 herbarium sheets deposited in the University of Washington Herbarium after the Fair, have detailed his itinerary and determined which species were collected at each location. They have then headed into the field to follow his route and attempt to relocate and re-collect in 1992 -- a century later -- the plants encountered by Henderson in the late 19 th century.

Following in Henderson’s footsteps took Sarah and Sharon from Orcas Island to Ilwaco; from Olympia to Spokane via Yakima, Coulee City, and Medical Lake; to Stampede Pass and Mt. Adams; to Palouse City, Pasco and Pullman, with other stops between. At these destinations they waded in ponds, searched urban sidewalks, investigated railroad tunnels, and explored forests, meadows and deserts, looking for plants seen a hundred years before. What was the result? In their Discussion they declare that the outcome was primarily negative in that only 27% of Henderson’s taxa were re-located. But what does this actually mean? As they point out it means many things: that Henderson’s geographic data was often vague, that urbanization has overwhelmed many of the early botanist’s locales, that logging, grazing, and other activities have altered many sites. In one of the most valuable sections of this Occasional Paper, the authors discuss factors such as forestry, hydrology, agriculture, grazing, and invasive species that have vastly impacted the Washington landscape since 1892. One statistic can stand for many: In 1890 the population of Washington was 337,000; in 1992 it was over five million!

After the Fair, Henderson and his family moved to Moscow Idaho where he was a University professor of botany until he retired and moved to Oregon in 1911. From 1924 to 1939 he was Curator of the University of Oregon Herbarium in Eugene. The World’s Fair episode encompassed less than two years of his long and productive life. Gage and Rodman have taken the records of this period and given us an analysis both fascinating and sobering. Readers will commend them for their efforts and for their thought-provoking conclusions.